My sister in law just asked me for advice on buying a new camera -- a question I get a lot. I always laugh when I get it because I think it's like asking a race car driver for advice on buying a family car or a professional chef for advice on what to order for lunch...you're going to get a much more complicated answer than you want and they'll probably talk you into something big and expensive that they understand and you don't.
But alas, no matter how much I try to ward off the question with that metaphor, I still get asked so I figured I'd post my answer here as a testament to how much of a camera geek I am and maybe it will be interesting reading for someone seriously wanting to learn about cameras.
So, you've reached the end of the interesting part of this post...check out now if you're not ready to get deep into the world of digital photography because here was my answer after we exchanged a few notes and I figured it was time to just start at the beginning. Keep in mind the context of this is for someone looking for an inexpensive household compact digital camera...nothing pro, just something to take pictures of the family at all the various events in life.
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Cameras are just fancy boxes that control light to capture an image. They have 3 ways of doing this:
1. Shutter speed – This is probably the cheapest feature — almost any camera will have the ability to slow down the shutter so much that you can get a good exposure (bright picture) but any shake in your hand or motion of the subject will blur the picture. There’s nothing really to shop for here between cameras....most are going to be comparable for your purposes.
2. ISO sensitivity – Cameras don’t work like our eyes — we can see in very dark situations as well as on a bright sunny day on the beach. Cameras can only work in small ranges compared to how we can see so time you take a picture the camera selects a sensitivity rating for how well it picks up light (back in the film days you had to buy a whole roll of film of the same sensitivity). The lower the number, the less sensitive to light so 50 or 100 is what it would use on a bright sunny day and 400, 800 or 1600 is what it would use indoors without a flash. This starts to separate cameras a little bit...not all have the ability to go up to 800 or 1600. The feature is getting a lot more popular though so it’s not hard to find. It’s not that simple though...the higher the sensitivity, the more you give up in terms of sharpness in the image and sometimes in resolution, so some cameras have an ISO 2000 or 3200 setting but the pictures are not so great but still better than not getting the shot at all. (some cameras can go up to something ridiculous like ISO 10,000 but they can only do that at lower resolutions and I can’t imagine the pictures are very good at all at this level). So, you still you want to shoot with the lowest ISO you can get away with to get the best picture. For most people, leaving it on automatic is going to be just fine. It gets even more complicated than this though...imagine your eyes in a very dark room and then suddenly you open the door and go outside into a bright sunny day — know how everything is blinding for just a few seconds? That’s what it’s like for cameras at high ISO settings. So if you have mixed light (like a relatively dark room and a bright window in the background), the camera can get really fooled. No camera can perfectly handle that situation so you have to know when to turn on the flash or get the window out of the frame so you get the picture inside. Basically, no matter what you get, I’d make sure the camera has the ability to shoot at a higher ISO rating than 400 ... Like 800, 1000 or 1600. Over 1600 probably won’t matter because it will look crummy and you won’t use it that often.
3. Aperture – The lens on the front of the camera lets the light in. The more light it lets in, the better. More light coming in means the ability to capture action (because it can use a faster shutter speed) or the lower light situation it can work in. Unfortunately this is just as confusing as anything else...the aperture on any compact camera is going to change as the zoom goes in and out. The quality of the lens has a great deal to do with the sharpness of your pictures too. There are Chinese cameras that have such poor lenses in them, they are actually sought after for artwork because they distort the pictures so much (look up Holga cameras sometime). Because of the costs of lens manufacturing, this is the most expensive feature of all. Fortunately, I’d say that most cameras in the $200-$500 range are all going to have average/adequate lenses and I probably wouldn’t make a buying decision on that feature. It really matters more on professional cameras. Consider though, a smaller, more compact camera is going to have less light gathering ability and probably poorer optics than a more mid-size camera. A larger camera has even more of a leg up — theoretically. So to translate, for you, consider that a teeny tiny compact camera is going to be very nice to carry around but will probably have a slight tradeoff in terms of picture quality versus a slightly larger one. Most manufacturers (Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Olympus, etc.) have a very small, thin version(s) that they market to the ladies and the younger crowd — something you’ll always take with you, etc. versus a normal size one that is probably less expensive and probably takes a better picture.
Because this is all so confusing, manufacturers use the buzz of megapixels to market cameras. Unfortunately, megapixels are just as complicated. More is not always better. It’s like you could have a 64oz steak but it would be all tough and chewy...versus a perfectly cut and cooked 6oz filet that is the finest meat you’ve ever had. Just because you had more doesn’t mean you had a better deal.
You can buy 12 megapixel cameras for just a few hundred bucks these days. Their sensors are nowhere as good as a professional camera with fewer megapixels though, and their pictures suffer. In fact, some of these pack in so many pixels that they are actually worse than a 6 megapixel or 8 megapixel camera because they’re just putting too much in one place. The point at where this happens is of course highly subjective so some folks are more than happy to have the bragging rights and own the most megapixels they can. You can print an 8”x10” picture just fine from a 4 megapixel image (in my opinion) so since most people are never even going to make 8x10s much less 5x7s from their prints, why should it matter? Think about it...when’s the last time you enlarged a picture? Some people think that if they take a 12 megapixel picture, they can just zoom waaaay in and make a normal print from a small part but this is not really practical since it also enlarges all the flaws in that overstuffed sensor and that (relatively) cheap lens so you end up with a blurry, crummy picture. Also consider that the more megapixels you have, the more storage space each picture takes up so less pictures on a card and more space on your hard drive.
Batteries are another thing to consider...the longer the battery lasts, the better for you and the easier it is to charge, the better. I like cameras that use AA batteries since you can buy rechargeable AAs and have a set on the charger and a set in the camera and if your batteries die, you can get AAs at any grocery store or gas station on the planet. Unfortunately cameras are more often coming with proprietary rechargeable batteries so having a spare is expensive and impractical so you just need to pay attention to battery life claims. For better or for worse, many manufacturers are listing this as a number of pictures you can take on a single charge. This may not be an apples to apples comparison – you need to read the fine print so you know if they’re talking about pictures with the flash or without or some of the time, etc. and compare it to your shooting style.
Don’t worry about what kind of memory cards the cameras use...they all seem to be different depending on the brand but as far as I’m concerned it’s usually a one time purchase. The Sony memory sticks are the most annoying since they’re the most expensive and least common. My advice is to buy a large capacity card – 1GB or more. That way you can last through a vacation and get all the pictures without having to worry about downloading. Or if you shoot video with the camera, you’ll have room for a few clips as well as your pictures. Just don’t fall into the trap of neglecting to download all the pictures frequently. I hear people lament that their camera was lost and pictures going back a year were all on there…don’t let that happen to you!
My favorite web site for reading about new cameras is www.dpreview.com. It has more than you’d ever want to read in reviews and specifications and it lists pretty much every model the major manufacturers have ever released so you can compare them side by side.
It seems a new camera comes out every day (maybe even more often) so things change rapidly but as of today, if I were to go out and buy a new camera for my family compact camera, I’d pick up the Fuji F40
– it’s fairly small, it has a built-in lense cover, it has the higher-ISO settings I like but the sensor has an above average image quality even when using these settings. The fact that it’s 8 megapixels is probably the least important feature to me…I’d still pick it up if it were 4 megapixels. I also love that it can take movies at a big 640x480 resolution --- that’s the same as broadcast television so if you’re caught without your video camera, you can still get a decent video.
-Tim
